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Posted on Tue, Mar 26, 2013 : 5:30 a.m.

Folk Festival hit Frank Fairfield headlining solo show at The Ark

By Kevin Ransom

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Frank Fairfield performs at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival in January.

Daniel J. Brenner | AnnArbor.com file photo

Frank Fairfield is a young man—only 28—but he seems to have an "old soul": He has tapped deeply into the vein of old-time traditional folk music, from Appalachia, the Southwest and other regions—songs from bygone eras that he has unearthed via his meticulous searches through the American folk-music canon.

Those searches include sifting through thrift stores and swap meets, collecting old 78 RPM records, and also tracking down sheet music for rare vintage songs that may not have been recorded since the 78s era.

He also writes his own compositions, but they are of the same rustic, organic vein as the trad tunes—the instrumentation on his two records thus far has consisted of fiddle, banjo and acoustic guitar—and are often heavily influenced by the trad tunes he finds.

When he goes out on tour, it's just him onstage, playing all those instruments himself, as well as singing, hooting and hollering in down-home fashion.

Fairfield is not well-known outside of trad-music circles, given his relatively young age and the fact that's only released two discs, but he got a fair amount of exposure when he opened for the Fleet Foxes in 2008. Before then, Fairfield wasn't even making a living from playing music—he was busking on the streets and working at a school, after previously working at a few factory jobs.

His first, self-titled release consisted of his own interpretations of trad songs, while his second disc, "Out on the Open West" (2010), mostly featured his own songs and a handful of guest artists.

He recently wrapped up the recording of his next disc, which he hopes will be ready in time for him to sell at stops on the short tour that comes to The Ark on Saturday.

His last disc was on the Tompkins Square label, but "I'm putting this one out on my own," he says. "It's just a lot of songs I've been playing lately. For a while there, I'd been drawing on a lot of the same songs, so I decided I needed some new songs to play," says Fairfield, who performed at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival in January.

PREVIEW

Frank Fairfield

  • Who: Young California-based musician who focuses on traditional folk music.
  • What: Fairfield, who plays fiddle, banjo and guitar, draws on the rustic, organic music of Appalachia, the Southwest and other traditional regional styles.
  • Where: The Ark, 316 South Main Street.
  • When: Saturday, March 30, 8 p.m.
  • How much: $15. Tickets available from The Ark box office (with no service charge); Michigan Union Ticket Office, 530 S. State St.; Herb David Guitar Studio, 302 E. Liberty St.; or online from MUTO.
Fairfield also doesn't always know where to make the distinction between "traditional" songs and his own songs. "A lot of those old tunes, once I discovered them, I found my own way to play them, so that they become my own songs—so I sometimes don't know where to draw the line. I sometimes don't put much stock into what's original or what's old—a lot of it's all the same to me," says Fairfield with a laugh during a recent interview from his home in Los Angeles.

He says his new album is similar to his two previous ones: "The instrumentation is the same—primarily string instruments. But lately I've enjoyed playing more fiddle tunes and more mazurkas, more Southwestern tunes, and songs from the old sheet music I've discovered, songs that were popular once, and are still well-known among folk musicians."

One of his key inspirations to explore traditional music was his grandfather, also a fiddler. "He turned me on to this music when I was a kid, and taught a lot of it to me, and then I just began listening to the culture, and absorbing what I heard. I also got into old blues pretty early on."

Fairfield takes a dim view of the commercialization of music and the corporatization of the culture. "There is a real human culture and manufactured, corporatized bubble-gum culture that's just there to sell you something," he says. "I like the music of actual culture, not manufactured culture, and I think it's kind of sad when that music is regarded as a relic, or something that's dead."

That's especially true given that so much of the music he loves "comes from cultures that are still vibrant, like Spanish-American people playing Californio, and Tejano music. My family is from the Republic of Rio Grande, and down there, it's not regarded as 'old-time' music—it's still being played every day. It's their popular music."

As one might suspect, Fairfield isn't that comfortable with labels in general. He's not even sure he likes the "traditional" term, or even the "folk-music" apellation. "I just think of it as down-home music, so people can call it whatever they want. I don't think much about what category it falls into, especially since I consider what I do to be a pretty mixed bag."

Although, one phrase he uses a couple of times to describe what he plays is "'vernacular' music—because it's a hodgepodge....I'm uncomfortable calling it 'traditional,' because the guys who wrote and recorded these songs didn't think of themselves as 'traditional' artists. This music was the popular music of the day.

"What I do is kind of a bastardization of West African music, Spanish-American, Polish-American, Hungarian-American, Appalachian....All those groups came to America and made this big racket and it all got mixed together. I like that about it, that it's all of these strains, coming together.

As for his passion for old 78s: "It's a really bad habit that consumes most of my disposable income," he jokes. "A lot of the songs on those 78s were never commercially recorded again. Anglo-American vernacular music was recorded commercially for a very short period, and by the Depression era, most of it was gone, and by World War II, the era of commercially-recorded vernacular music was pretty much over."

Fairfield has also compiled a selection of rare and unheralded gramophone recordings from around the world, titled "Unheard Ofs & Forgotten Abouts" on his own Pawn imprint.

Recently, though, he's had to cut back on his accumulation of old 78s. "I picked up so many of them for so long, that eventually they started coming to me without my even looking for them—people began bringing them to me," he says. "So, now I've got a lot of stuff that I haven't even had a chance to listen to yet. So, I'm going to have to catch up with all of that before I go out and start accumulating more of them."

Kevin Ransom is a freelance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.